FROM MY COZY COUCH

That cast iron muffin pan was on the 

top shelf and hard to reach, its awkward

balance tipped toward one side and it was 

all I could do to just hang on. Eight pounds of

cast iron on my foot and you could call me Crip.

An hour later and the cinnamon apple muffins

were hot and delicious and made a nice finish 

to my empty morning.

On the television wall, there was a woman riding

an old Yamaha through the Panir-Alay mountains

of Tajikistan. I’ve seen it once before when I met a

man from there. On Google Earth he showed me his 

house and village in a valley under sheer, gray cliffs 

of lifeless rock and scree. In his hardscrabble Eden,

the horizons were thousands of feet straight up, the

Tajikistan sky a slender blue ribbon. The landscape

is a painful scar from an imponderable upheaval of 

broken, bleeding earth. “Panir-Alay” is a melodious 

name for empty miles of jagged mountains and broken

stones through occasional villages on narrow flood-plains

where the Tajiks have planted meager plots with gardens

so green, they steal your breath. Not that your breath

is important to a universe laid down as scraggy walls of

sterile monzonite, and barely suffers these tatterdemalion

natives crawling around at the bottom of things. These 

mountains do not know of you, a mere fleck of dust on 

the face of time. We the people are the invasive intrusion 

of humanity bent on making our mark with two hundred 

square feet of peas, potatoes and wheat beside a raging river. 

Reviews

[Michael Sun Bear]

Wonderful Vol, You took me from your kitchen shelf to a place I’ve never been, never will be. But I may have to search out some documentaries. You were so descriptive, really transported me.